


What All The Fuss Is About

by rebeccastceir



Series: An End. A Beginning.  - MOOD BOARD [17]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship, Beginnings, Canon Compliant, Canon Era, Canon Universe, Drinking, Drinking & Talking, Friends to Nap Buddies to Lovers, Light Angst, M/M, Post-Canon, Post-Fall of Overwatch, Post-Overwatch Recall, Sort Of, Strangers, Strangers to Friends, Talking, Very Very Light Angst, i think, implied sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:06:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28096629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rebeccastceir/pseuds/rebeccastceir
Summary: Hanzo’d heard the name Jesse McCree of course. Heard it from Genji: his Blackwatch best friend. Heard it from Echo: frequent bodyguard of her creator Dr Liao, present at Echo’s awakening in Switzerland, the one who rescued and reactivated her in America, one of the few people she considered to be a true friend. Heard it bandied about frequently as one of the former Black- and Overwatch members Winston was most desperate to recruit. But Hanzo had privately formed the impression that Jesse McCree was one of the least likely to appear. A sixty-million dollar bounty gave a man very few reasons to poke his head up, and any number of reasons to keep it low.Looks like he was mistaken.
Relationships: Jesse McCree/Hanzo Shimada, McHanzo
Series: An End. A Beginning.  - MOOD BOARD [17]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2002075
Comments: 24
Kudos: 170





	1. Strangers to Friends

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文-普通话 國語 available: [【授权翻译】大惊小怪 - What All The Fuss Is About](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28914222) by [TachibanaYuna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TachibanaYuna/pseuds/TachibanaYuna)



> Now that I've had some time to read up on canon and lore, it strikes me that it must have been really weird to be one of the first to arrive at Gibaltar post-recall, but see all the "newcomers" come in and realize most of them are original Overwatch/Blackwatch.
> 
> The wonderful TachibanaYuna has translated this into Mandarin! If you read Mandarin, please check it out and give them some love!

“ _Jesse?!_ ”

Hanzo looked up in time to see his little brother fling himself at a bear of a man dressed in red and gold, heard Genji laughing, and watched with interest. Hanzo’d heard the name Jesse McCree of course. Heard it from Genji: his Blackwatch best friend. Heard it from Echo: frequent bodyguard of her creator Dr Liao, present at Echo’s awakening in Switzerland, the one who rescued and reactivated her in America, one of the few people she considered to be a true friend. Heard it bandied about frequently as one of the former Black- and Overwatch members Winston was most desperate to recruit. But Hanzo had privately formed the impression that Jesse McCree was one of the least likely to appear. A sixty-million dollar bounty gave a man very few reasons to poke his head up, and any number of reasons to keep it low.

Looked like he was mistaken.

“Hanzo! Hanzo!” Genji bounced on his toes, waving madly at him. “Jesse, my _anija_ is here! Come! You have to meet each other! Come! Come!” He was so excited his English was failing.

The cowboy - for a cowboy, in fact, he was, Hanzo was…there wasn’t an entirely good word in English for what Hanzo felt upon meeting him. Somewhere between amused and bewildered, maybe. Why on earth a grown-ass man would choose to dress like it was 1885 was utterly beyond him. But there he was, 6 feet 1 of had-to-be-an-American, wearing a broad-brimmed Stetson hat, a red-and-gold…whatever that was, a button-down plaid flannel, faded khaki jeans, and honest-to-gods cowboy boots with spurs.

Hanzo wanted to laugh at him. Wanted to ridicule him.

Wanted to thank him for being such a good friend to Genji.

The cowboy had tipped his hat politely - Hanzo was even more amused that someone actually _did that_ \- but seemed to share Hanzo’s uncertainty. He extricated himself as politely as he could, the moment Genji gave him a break. Claimed tiredness from the journey, a need to “wash off the road dust” and settle in. Genji had seemed disappointed to let him go, and talked Hanzo’s ear off for the next hour about him. Hanzo politely tuned him out after two minutes.

He was happy for Genji. He really was.

He just didn’t see what all the fuss was about.

He didn’t see much of McCree over the next three days. A tiny half-day mission pulled Genji and Hanzo out on escort duty, and when they got back, Genji’d discovered McCree had been sent out on another job. He moped around for the next day and a half, recounting his and Jesse’s greatest hits for what felt like the umpteenth time. Hanzo finally extracted himself that evening and went up to his favorite tower.

Found it already occupied by red and gold.

“Sorry,” a low voice drawled. “Didn’t know this tower’d already been called dibs.”

Hanzo stopped on the stairs. “It’s harder to get to,” he conceded after a moment. The only explanation he was willing to give.

The hat nodded slowly.

Neither of them made any effort to give ground.

“One place I never been to, Gibraltar,” the hat said eventually, waving a flask at the cityscape. “Been all over Europe. Lotsa different Overwatch bases. Never quite managed to get here.”

“I never traveled much for business,” Hanzo said, stepping slowly towards the rail, curious why the hat decided to have _this_ , of all possible conversations. “Business always came to me.”

“In Japan.”

“Yes.”

“In Hanamura.”

 _Ah._ “Yes.”

The hat turned.

Hanzo found himself looking into a handsome face, with a wide, generous mouth that was used to smiling a lot, and eyes that gave him _absolutely_ _nothing_.

“Never thought I’d meet that man that tried to kill my friend,” McCree said quietly. His voice gave nothing either.

Hanzo nodded slowly. “I never expected to meet the man who became his brother in my stead.” He forced himself to relax, to lean his elbows casually against the chest-high rail.

McCree mimicked him, eyes still on him, flask still in his hand. A weapon, if he wanted it, his body coiled as readily, as quietly, as a snake. “Few years ago, I woulda tried to kill ya.”

Hanzo nodded quietly again, his eyes still on the city. “A few years ago, I would’ve let you.”

Nothing more really needed to be said, after that.

The cowboy didn’t show up on the tower again.

The months passed quietly. Nothing much happened for a while. Overwatch still wasn’t official, but several smaller groups and countries were asking for their help - willing to ignore the Petras Act if it got them the assistance that they needed. Winston reviewed every request as much for morality as feasibility, and it helped that more and more new recruits kept trickling in.

Well, Hanzo thought _new_ , but really, most of them were _old_ recruits. A living rhinocerous of a German named Reinhardt, and his equally-emboldened young protegé and goddaughter, Brigitte. A troll of a man named Torbjorn - apparently Brigitte’s father? Hanzo was confused why she ran around with her godfather and not her _actual_ father, but when the three of them sat down to raucous drinking in the forge one night Hanzo decided that all three of them together were more than the world should be asked to put up with. A Swiss doctor calling herself Mercy showed up a few days later, to hugs and smiles from both Norsemen, as well as Genji and McCree.

The one that puzzled him, though, was an electrum-haired soldier in a leather coat and face-concealing visor. McCree and Genji both looked like they’d seen a ghost.

Hanzo knew the name Soldier76 of course. Everyone did. What he didn’t expect was for McCree to take one look at the man and utter a hoarse “Jack?” before collapsing on him like a long-lost relative. The man stood there stiffly - Hanzo got the impression he hadn’t expected to be recognized - before clinging to McCree just as fiercely. Genji hung back, regarding the man with something like awe.

A one-eyed bird of a woman showed up a few days later. Another long-lost relative. Another home-coming.

Hanzo began to feel like he and the other “originals” were actually the newcomers.

Hana was still the youngest of them - at 19, her youth and skill at piloting a mecha lent her an utter fearlessness, and a belief in her own invincibility that saved her as often as it endangered her. Lúcio, their combat medic, in his mid-twenties, who seemed to regard every new arrival as another guest at life’s ongoing party - with himself as its designated DJ. And Genji, of course, had brought Zenyatta, his Shambali mystic - another one barely in his twenties, for all his wisdom. Hanzo didn’t resent Genji for having him, didn’t resent him for being an Omnic - couldn’t, really, not when Zenyatta had brought Genji peace, helped him forge a path towards their reconciliation. Still, it wasn’t hard to notice after a while that Hanzo and a certain hat made up half of their age group, and that neither he nor the hat much seemed to enjoy Lucio’s ongoing pajama party.

Hanzo found the hat on his tower again late one night, when he couldn’t get to sleep.

“Noisy down there, ain’t it?” the hat drawled, voice thick from hours of blessed silence.

“Yes, it is,” Hanzo agreed.

They sat in the balmy Mediterranean darkness and said nothing more.

The hat started showing up again almost nightly after that.

Sometimes they made small talk. Sometimes they didn’t. Neither one of them apologized for anything they’d said the first night - thanked each other, rather, for Genji’s sake.

After that it had become…easier, somehow. A lost parent, the altered course of a childhood, were things Hanzo hadn’t expected to share with anyone else at the Watchpoint, least of all the American. Genji had talked about McCree as the life of the party, always crazy, always instigating something clever and mischievous. Whatever it was, the last few years on his own seemed to have beaten it out of him. The gauntlet on his left arm wasn’t a gauntlet at all, but a metal prosthetic. Genji’d demanded to know what had happened, only to be quietly put off. The stylized skull didn’t seem to fit the cowboy’s style, and Hanzo couldn't understand why he hadn’t scraped it off. It was horrendously noticeable - not that subtlety seemed to be the cowboy’s strength on any occasion, or even his concern.

Hanzo asked him about the get-up once.

“Old movies,” the cowboy’d chuckled, looking down at his apparel. “Always kinda liked the look. Seein’ as I’m from Texas.”

“Yes, but why wear it all the time?” Hanzo’d inquired.

“Sixty million dollar bounty gets ya noticed,” the cowboy’d shrugged, eyes flicking back over the city. “Saves time if they know it won’t be easy to get.”

In that light, even the skull made sense.

“What did you do, to garner such a bounty?” Hanzo'd asked him.

The cowboy pretended not to hear.

Hanzo hadn’t asked him about it again.

The next time he went up to the tower he took his sake gourd, offered it to the cowboy. McCree handed over his flask, and they proceeded to get plastered. It was the first time Hanzo ever heard him laugh.

He understood what the fuss was about the first time he spotted him in the practice range. Eight targeting bots went down on six shots, and Hanzo didn’t understand how it happened - until the cowboy turned to reload, and Hanzo saw his right eye glowing red.

“What is that?” he blurted, before he thought about it.

The cowboy looked up, and there was something horrific and skull-like about half of his face, and the skull on his arm made even _more_ sense. He looked Hanzo over carefully, and slowly the red faded, the outline of a skull nothing more than the curve of his cheek. McCree took the cigarillo out of his mouth. “Would you b’lieve me if I said I made a deal with the devil?” he asked.

Hanzo looked down at his own arm. “Would you think me strange if I said yes?”

McCree’s smile was one-sided and brief. He stuck the cigarillo back in his mouth and turned back to the range. “We all got secrets, Han,” he drawled, as the bots pulled themselves together again and he sighted. “Ain’t that much difference ‘tween magic and tech.”

Hanzo held his hand out and murmured the words, blowing over his fingertips and sending his spirit dragons frolicking down the range, batting the targeting bots out of the air like cat toys. When McCree turned to look at him wide-eyed, it was Hanzo’s turn to smile.

“How well I know.”


	2. Friends to Lovers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the first time in decades, maybe his whole life, Hanzo’s soul felt clean.

Their tower conversations got more interesting after that. It was as if the two of them realized they had no more need for secrets. Not to say that they spilled their dirtiest immediately - some things they still had to work up to - but they stayed up later, talked longer into the night. They started teasing each other on the practice range and during training, started having friendly competitions - who could fire more shots, who could hit more targets, trick shots and hand-to-hand combat. They were more evenly matched than either of them had anticipated, and their sparring sessions quickly burned off McCree’s beer-belly, and honed Hanzo’s reflexes. Their missions forged a bedrock of trust - they learned what each other could be relied on for and where their weaknesses were, gained an accurate estimation of each other’s abilities, and learned the absolute necessity of keeping in contact and asking for help.

McCree’s instincts - and Hanzo learned early that the cowboy was _far_ more subtle than his gaudy appearance let on - were impeccable, even if he did tend to ‘wing’ things more than Hanzo was comfortable with, and his native friendliness herded Hanzo out of his isolation as surely as a cattle-dog nipping at strays. Hanzo, for his part, was a natural strategist, and McCree learned to rely on his planning, to trust Hanzo to have his back, while Hanzo learned to adapt when the cowboy’s instincts told him to. Alone they were formidable - together, they were nearly unstoppable.

They also learned each other’s limits - Hanzo disliked talking about his years as head of the Shimada yakuza, while for McCree it was everything before Deadlock. But three or four or six months down the road, Hanzo confessed everything wrong and misguided, selfish and bullying and confused, that led him to try to kill Genji. How the belief that he had succeeded had broken him. And it was _Jesse_ , not McCree, who tucked him into his shoulder while he cried. Maybe it was before, maybe it was after, when Jesse explained how Gabe Reyes had hauled him out of Deadlock and set him on the right path. How much he owed Gabe - and Gabe’s partner, Jack Morrison - for his life, his education, his abilities.

“I know Blackwatch is a dirty word now,” Jesse muttered, his eyes wet, looking out over the city. “But they were my _family_. I dunno what happened. I dunno why Gabe did what he did, why everything seemed to go wrong. I don’t even know what happened in Switzerland. But seein’ Jack again… Seein’ Jack’s makin’ me hope that maybe Gabe’s out there too. An’ if he is, maybe we c’n find him. Maybe we c’n all put ourselves back together.”

Hanzo quietly plucked Jesse’s hat off and set it aside, before drawing his head down against his shoulder. Jesse stayed there for a long time, and both of them, who had felt so lonely and forlorn and confused before, felt less so.

Eventually Hanzo shivered.

“You cold?” Jesse asked.

“Yes,” Hanzo admitted. “The breeze up here is stronger than I anticipated tonight.”

“I keep tellin ya, Han, you gotta wear somethin’ warmer‘n that damn gi all the time,” Jesse fussed, tugging his serape off and wrapping it around both of their shoulders.

“You think everything cooler than your desert is cold,” Hanzo teased, but he readjusted until it was Jesse sitting up a little straighter, and Hanzo leaning against him. Hanzo realized then, and _only_ then, as he snuggled in, with Jesse’s body heat all around him and their arms around each other, that this, that _they_ , were something more than friends. But it felt right. His head was against Jesse’s shoulder, one arm around his waist under the serape, and it didn’t matter if it was the needs of the moment or something more. It felt _right_.

He fell asleep there.

Didn’t wake up for hours, until Jesse jostled him, sent him to bed.

They started sleeping together after that.

Jesse found Hanzo the next day, lounging on the couch in the common room, hogging up the only patch of sunlight with a good seat, back against the arm of the couch while he read his tablet. Jesse wandered in, and, without asking, lay down between Hanzo’s legs with his head on Hanzo’s stomach. Hanzo yelped, but Jesse mumbled “Y’owe me after last night,” and promptly went to sleep, his arms around Hanzo’s waist.

Hanzo stared at him in alarm for a few seconds, until he realized that nothing embarrassing was happening farther south, and Jesse was already snoring softly. Hanzo himself wasn’t actually uncomfortable, or even unhappy about the arrangement - just surprised. He readjusted a bit, to make sure both he and Jesse were comfortable, and went back to reading. At some point his hand dropped into Jesse’s hair, absently stroking it while he read. He hesitated a moment when he caught himself doing it, but there was something so horrendously self-soothing about it, and Jesse’s hair was so soft… Did Jesse mind? Hanzo did it again… Jesse hummed in his sleep and snuggled in a bit deeper.

Hanzo carried on.

After about an hour he got sleepy himself, and wiggled down lower, until his head was resting on the arm of the couch and Jesse’s head was higher against his chest. Jesse readjusted with him - still without waking - and they slept for several more hours. When Hanzo woke, someone had put a blanket over them and turned off the common room light.

Hanzo hadn’t even heard them.

He lay there quietly for a while, the cowboy asleep against his chest, and realized he’d slept better in those few hours with Jesse than he had in months on his own. Maybe _years_.

Jesse must have slept well too, because from then on, he had no hesitation whatsoever about _finding_ Hanzo whenever he decided it was nap time. And if Hanzo was busy, Jesse would not only _track him down_ but _wait for him_. Even worse, Hanzo’s body not only settled into the nap schedule, but started _demanding_ it, so long as they weren’t on a mission. He found himself getting uncontrollably sleepy if he tried to put it off, and on those occasions when it was he who was waiting for Jesse, even caught himself dozing off against a wall.

For a while, if the common room was empty they slept there - the couch was plenty big enough, and it wasn’t like they were doing anything they needed to hide. But after the third or fourth time waking up with Hana sitting on their feet playing video games, or the whole gang in watching movies, they took it elsewhere. Hanzo’s room was at the far end of the hall, the farthest away from the common room and any noise, and they unanimously voted between them that it would be the better nap spot. It was easier in another way too: whenever it was nap time, they simply met there, instead of combing through the base looking for each other.

Hanzo realized eventually that they could’ve just set a time to meet on the couch, but he chalked it up to decades of sleep deprivation, that neither of them had ever even thought of it.

Having Jesse asleep in his bed at naptime provided one other benefit that Hanzo noticed _right_ off the bat: bed still smelled like him come nightfall, and Hanzo slept better for it. Jesse looked like a trainwreck by comparison. Hanzo gave it a week to be certain of the cause, and then told Jesse. They started alternating nap rooms.

It dawned on Hanzo, somewhere very early on, that all this must look very _weird_ \- two grown men determined to take _naps_ with each other. Sex probably would have been less suspicious. But he couldn’t really bring himself to _care_ , and when he mentioned it to Jesse, Jesse couldn’t seem to be bothered either. After what felt like a lifetime of anxiety, always looking over their shoulders, they both slept better if the other one was there - simple as that. Hanzo also noticed that Jesse didn’t bring his flask up on the tower so often anymore, and he himself left the sake behind. Both of them were better off for that, too.

They were in Hanzo’s room one night when he woke to find the base suspiciously quiet. A quick appeal to Athena told him it was almost midnight - they’d napped straight through supper. Hanzo wasn’t hungry, and Jesse was still sound asleep… Hanzo pulled the blanket up over them both and went back to sleep.

He felt Jesse stirring sometime in the early pre-dawn, and held onto the arm around his waist.

“You don’ haveta get up,” Hanzo mumbled.

“It’s almost mornin’,” Jesse husked. “Shoulda kicked me out hours ago.”

“Who _cares_ ,” Hanzo grumbled, tightening his grip on Jesse’s arm and trying to burrow deeper into the pillows. “’S warm.”

He considered it a minor personal victory that Jesse gave up and simply snuggled back in.

“I might have morning wood,” Jesse warned, right before he fell asleep again.

“So what else is new,” Hanzo replied.

He woke a few hours later with Jesse’s half-chub against his hip. And, frankly, one of his own. He ignored both, and went back to sleep.

He woke up a few days later to Jesse’s chub against his hip, and Jesse’s lips trailing tiny soft kisses against the curve of his neck. Hanzo laid there for a while and pretended to still be asleep, while he sorted out how he felt about both. It didn’t take long.

He was fine with it.

A few days later he awoke to more kisses, and rolled over, returning them just as comfortably as they’d been given. If Jesse was startled, it didn’t take long for him to relax again.

It was nearly a given that they slept together every night after that.

Hanzo wasn’t always the little spoon. He learned, when Jesse had nightmares, that spooning him didn’t help and waking him up made it worse, but rolling him onto his side and rubbing his back soothed him - and _then_ , after he settled, cuddled him back into deeper sleep. He didn’t know exactly what Jesse did for him, only that he woke several times from nightmares, his heartbeat already calming down, and simply rolled into Jesse’s arms and went back to sleep again as easily as if he’d never woken at all.

On the few times when they both woke up and neither one of them could get back to sleep, they got up and sat in the kitchen with coffee and tea, and found something else to talk about.

Genji, surprisingly, never teased them about any of it - when Hanzo asked if their relationship bothered him, Genji’d just shrugged. “Everyone needs somebody to talk to. I have Zenyatta. Jack and Ana are still friends. Whatever your relationship is, it’s between the two of you. I’m just glad you both have someone. You deserve to be happy.”

Hanzo didn’t realize how much he’d been _waiting_ for that. When he and Jesse went to bed that night they stopped at Jesse’s room for his toothbrush and pajamas, as they did every-other night, and then walked hand-in-hand down the hallway to Hanzo’s room. They went about brushing teeth and getting ready for bed, as they did every night, and climbed in, as they had every night, and made love for the first time ever - something so new and perfect and strange that Hanzo hesitated to even call it ‘love’, though he didn’t have another word for it - and it happened so naturally he couldn’t call it anything else. Having Jesse, _his_ cowboy, in his bed, in his arms, made him feel _complete_ , in a way that he hadn’t anticipated. And afterward he lay in the dark just listening to him sleep. For the first time in decades, maybe his whole life, Hanzo’s soul felt clean.

Jesse seemed to feel the same way. His sense of humor came out more - corny cowboy jokes and cheesy nicknames, mischievous pranks and playful banter. He started calling Hanzo’s room, at the farthest end of the hallway, ‘the dragon’s nest’, made jokes about being carted off by a ‘beast’. Hanzo simply rolled his eyes and shook his head, issued warm, softly-smiling threats, until it was Jesse who was laughing and blushing, sliding hands around Hanzo’s waist and lips against his neck, murmuring his own brand of teasing promises in reply. Neither of them cared if they got ragged by the others for it - it was like they inhabited the same bubble. And even though Hanzo knew it might pop eventually - nightmares and lonely nights and even fights - still, there was bedrock underneath it, a solid friendship, built on months of honesty, loyalty, and trust. And maybe it was too soon. Maybe only _months_ of friendship weren’t enough.

But then again, maybe a lifetime _without_ it had been.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a feeling Hana sat on them in an effort to make them go elsewhere


End file.
